


Glory and Gore

by whitesilverandmercury



Category: Shingeki no Kyojin
Genre: A little bit of gore, AU prompt, Happy halloween, M/M, Zombie Apocalypse, Zombie Violence, armin channeling some abc café, children swinging baseball bats at zombies, dissident marco, feeding in public, human/vampire prejudices, parents dying, vampire, vampire violence?, zombieland meets les mis meets in the flesh meets resident evil meets queen of the damned
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-10-31
Updated: 2014-10-31
Packaged: 2018-02-23 09:53:01
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 7,893
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2543291
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whitesilverandmercury/pseuds/whitesilverandmercury
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>How it happened was that six months ago, before he was hungry, Eren was sick. “Oh,” Armin gasped, “this is classified research, isn’t it?” Hanji smirked weakly. Levi dropped his hand to his lap, perfect shock softening his face to the same tender familiarity with which he’d moaned as Eren had rode him upstairs in some forgotten bedroom. He spoke quickly, but not kindly, because the realizing was not patient: “Oh my God, the antibody is inside you, isn’t it, Eren?”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Glory and Gore

**i. the double tap**

“Good, that was good. You’ve got great aim somehow, which I don’t understand, because you’re a reckless reflexive little shit and reckless reflex isn’t gonna get you anywhere.”

The bullet ripped through the zombie’s head, bad blood bursting from its face like a few teeth and half the tongue as its lower jaw blew off its skull—almost, but not all the way. It hung by a few strands of rotten sinew, tongue still squirming against chipped and rotted bottom teeth.

“All right, let’s go—I took out five of them. That was my goal, right? Five?”

The zombie tumbled to the ground, still twitching and jerking with the last spasms of dried-up muscles. Foamy gray bile oozed out with the blood from the place where the bullet shredded the spinal cord at the base of the neck. The sound of skin and bones rattling on the pavement was like the rustling of leaves across the street as a wind picked up, weaving through the empty cars left on the M1 from years ago. This was training ground, now. This was within the first few miles of the no-inhabitance zone.

“Good aim, but you forgot the most important rule. You remembered it the last four times. You’re getting frustrated. _Stop_ and _think_.”  

Some of the bad blood had splattered across Eren’s cheek. He straightened up, panting; he lifted an arm and swiped away the viscid gunk, tried to flick it off his fingers before it stained like coal. “What?” he demanded. “What did I forget?”

Levi shrugged, skirting a crashed farm truck and turning the handle of a tiny personal axe over and over in his palm. Casually, he cocked back and swung hard, hacking the zombie’s broken skull from its rotting shoulders. Propping a foot up on the dead thing’s rolling head and looking all too fucking regal and hot for it, he pointed with the axe.

“The double tap,” he said, meaning the second hit to ensure the thing was not going to come back.

The smell of gunpowder still tickled Eren’s sensitive nose as he crossed through a spill of moonlight and used the sleeves of his sweater to wipe the bad blood off Levi’s nose and cheek.

“ _You’re_ a double tap,” he grumbled.

Nailed it.

* * *

**ii. the boy who cried vampire**

They took over because they could survive it.

A mortal man could not have his arm and leg bitten off and live—not really—and if somehow he did, he’d be severely disfigured—but a _vampire_ had some supernatural trick, some angiogenesis on steroids. Their biotics allowed for almost immediate repair and regeneration of even a seemingly fatal wound—bones, limbs, flesh, hair. It had something to do with the unholy preservation of their last mortal moment; it was also why they didn’t age.

They were not invincible, no; they had their limitations. But they took over because they were the superior race and this was their time to shine.

They took over because the human world—government, civilization, medicine, science—failed miserably, and failed fast, and they took over because like the virus that wiped out over half of the world’s population within three years, decimating cities, families, nations, yes, like the grotesque mutation that made zombies out of otherwise regular dead, theirs—the vampire’s—was an ancient and preternatural existence.

And they were ready to take the stage.

Armin didn’t hate the vampires.

He appreciated their ingenuity, actually, their mercy and their chivalry. Some of the more eccentric qualities of their culture and their reign enraged those clinging to rose-tinted spectacles for dear life; not Armin. He loved the vampires’ obsession with old world charm while others cursed the vampires’ neglect for modernity.

The vampires renovated forgotten buildings into strange palaces where old met new—gothic mansions and haunted music halls turned into contemporary hubs, stained-glass and leaded windows refurbished into computer screens that, with the flip of a switch, the turn of a dial, the slide of a control, became digital sunrises, digital sunsets, digital daylight. If they really cared that much, some dissidents bitched, why didn’t they revamp the _world_? (Ha; puns.) Why didn’t they repair the broken-down business blocks, the ghost towns, the dilapidated neighborhoods, the towering skyscrapers pocked with holes like ruined bee hives? Why didn’t they restore once-bustling metropolises instead of leaving humans to their barbed-wire communes, rusting metal, well water, dreams of the flat-screen TVs and democratic elections and water-efficient toilets with two flush settings of ten years that felt like eternities ago?

They came crawling out of the woodwork when the last wave of outbreak evacuation hit and the hospitals were already full of wounded and mutating, and the scientists were losing the race to identify the virus. The vampires came out and they said, “We’ll protect you if you allow us to feed on you.”

And so it became, a strange and morbidly fascinating interdependence. 

The separation of class was almost medieval; and that was what it was all over again, in the same vicious cycle of all intelligent society, like the serpent eating its tail. A _class separation_. A whole new sinister and seductive bourgeoisie, staking claim on a world in peril. It was the natural order of the world: the rulers, and the ruled. And there was nothing for a man to do now but accept his place under the yoke of Undead tutelage, or fight miserably to no avail.

Maybe it was only to be expected. Humans had taken far too many luxuries for granted and if anyone—er, any _thing_ —was to survive the “end of the world” (cockroaches, right?), it was someone, something, who knew how to live without the luxuries of the recent era. 

The vampires held their inexplicable immortality over the humans’ heads, but—it wasn’t that bad, actually.

Armin had been in a vampire’s mansion before; he’d seen the fake LED sunrises in the windows. He, legally, under the Vampiric Code, belonged to a rather philanthropic blood drinker who’d taken on quite a lot of the refugees that had flooded the city once mankind realized fighting the vampire rise to power was absolutely futile when outside the vampire cities there was nothing but desolation, looted gas stations, blood-stained and forgotten traffic jams, tumbleweeds and zombies. _Hanji_ was the name of his vampire mistress, _Hanji_ of the trench coats and sloppy half-backs and wild intellectual eyes, _Hanji_ who was one of the only vamps who ever showed her face in the human districts because Hanji didn’t ever pretend to be better than them, sometimes Hanji even pretended to _be_ one of them, Hanji believed in interdependent equality and a balance between living and Undead, and Hanji liked to forward Armin’s petitions to higher governing Estates and promote peaceful coexistence, and Hanji liked to sometimes sneak zombies into her basement to poke and prod at, fascinated by the way their foggy pupils didn’t dilate and their skin cells broke down and their only neural activity whatsoever was programmed to devour—

No, it wasn’t that bad, but the system of interdependence was in dire need of reform, and Armin had always had revolution pumping through his veins.

“We’re calling for basic liberties, the freedom of consent! Take this pamphlet, sign this petition, constitutionalize our freedom to consensual desanguination, or keep living every night in fear of vampire violence!”

Armin led rallies.

He was not a Stokerian Pacifist, or on the Purist Committee, and he wasn’t an Anti-Vamp like the Apotropaic Activists (read: radical vampire hunters). No; he held Coalition meetings in coffeehouses in the tight cramped “waster” district of the city, wasters being mortals, because mortals “wasted away” to bones and dust and old age, wasters with their mandated “H” badges and no right to bear arms.

Armin wore his “H” badge proudly, emblazoned on the breast pocket of his faded denim jacket, scarf tucked in under his throat, tweed cap keeping unruly blond hair at bay while he preached to a crowd from a fire escape hanging crooked over an alley, or from a table in the local café who never told him to stop raising his voice or smoking his cigarettes or tipping the barista for the extra shot of espresso. They even posted his Shared Existence Manifesto (the third draft), but some anti-vamp motherfuckers tore it down and graffitied the brick outside with derogations and slurs.

To put it bluntly, Armin was a local saint and everyone in the waster district of the city either loved him or absolutely hated him.

The vampires had outlawed firearms for humans a year ago, too afraid of some genius mortal or another loading a bullet with holy water and assassinating one of them (it had been tried, just like hidden stakes). And Vampiric Code was not a set of laws to be fucked with. Welcome back to absolutism, where a ruler loves like a father and punishes like a return to French public torture. Vampires had also instated curfews, backassward curfews that forced nocturnality on the masses. Radio was monitored; public eateries and markets were overrun with protein and high-iron foods. Blaring public sirens became warnings and curfew announcements. There was no free travel; human civilization outside the vampire developments was not only fucking _stupid_ because zombies crawled the no-inhabitance zone, but it was also criminalized. The vampires roamed those places, exterminating zombies. It was part of the Protection Treaty. In return, the humans stayed inside the walls—

“Armin!”

Marco elbowed through the crowd in the corner of the sweet warm coffeeshop, all freckles and grins and cowlick at the widow’s peak. His eyes danced; his dimples were deep; the bruises on his throat looked more like hickeys and he wasn’t trying to hide them with Band-Aids today, which was good. “Um, _excuse me_ ,” he muttered to the few strangers who just would not get out of his way, squeezing past as they shuffled around pamphlets and the petition to sign for a constitutional reform on the necessity of consent before becoming a vampire’s arbitrary snack. 

Armin slipped outside with him. They shared a hand-rolled cigarette. Marco sputtered, under the faulty streetlamps and splash of stars, “I heard some vampire started television up again. Some vamp in Spain. Only for vamps, though. Like always.”

“That’s a rumor—”

“What, like the ‘rumor’ about what happened to the Hunters who tried to stake some blood baron in what used to be Paris?”

“The Baron didn’t impale them like Vlad. _That_ is a rumor—”

“Or the ‘rumor’ that vamps feed humans to zombies to keep the pestilence going?”

“Marco, no one’s proven that’s true.”

“I don’t get how you trust them so much.” Marco’s brow knotted. He nibbled on the thoughts, watching his feet. He was too heroic for his own good most of the time. Something was eating him; something had him all pinched up and smiling sadly. “Whatever, what I really wanted to tell you was—”

“ _Arlert!_ ”

Armin and Marco both bristled and looked up, finding the source of the sound at about the same moment—though Marco’s face hardened with steely contempt, and Armin’s softened with shy respect.

It was Hanji.

Hanji, his mad scientist beneficiary, with her assistant Moblit close on her heels like a kicked puppy, rounding a corner and striding strong down the street. She wasn’t wearing her fake “H” badge tonight; humans who realized this skirted wide away.

Armin hurried forth to meet Hanji under a flickering streetlight, but Marco shrank back closer to the coffeehouse door, and why wouldn’t he when usually a vamp strutting through waster neighborhoods meant it was on the prowl for some pranic energy—pranic energy in the blood, pranic energy in sex—

“I almost have enough signatures,” Armin gushed. “I’m really pushing for consent this time, that’s my focus, just consent—”

Hanji was not smiling. Her inhuman eyes flashed; her gregarious mouth was in a sharp line. She caught Armin by the collar and leaned close, hissing into his ear:

“I need you to come with me. We’re leaving tonight.”

Armin reared back, but she held him by the sleeve. He looked to her in dismay, brow knotted, mouth open. “Where are you going?”

“ _We_ ,” Hanji reiterated. “I need you to come, too.”

“Hanji, I can’t just _leave_. I have work later tonight—”

“ _I need you_ ,” Hanji said one last time, fixing him with her powerful gaze. She was not joking; she was not bluffing. Something was awry here and she needed him. Suddenly she seemed to understand his misgivings and she tried to smile, brow dimpling. She let go of his sleeve, smoothed his denim collar down. She was like an older sister, or a mother, or an older sister who became the mother after the mother died outside the walls.

“For sustenance, yes,” she confirmed his doubts, “but also because you’re my little plan man. Okay?”

 _Sustenance_. She needed him to feed on, wherever she—wherever _they_ were going. But— _plan man_?

Armin caved.

She’d taken him in after his grandfather had died. His loyalty to her just ran too deep; it was a loyalty of blood and tears and trust.

“Okay,” he murmured. “Do I need to pack?”

Marco peeped from the shadows, “The hell’s going on here?” Moblit sneered at him. Marco sneered back.

Armin waved a dismissive hand Marco’s way. “Will you wait for me to pack?”

Hanji nodded. “Pack one bag. Whatever else you need, I’ll provide for you.”

Armin left the pamphlets and petitions with Marco. Marco choked on his protests. Armin stopped him with a hand to his elbow, an imploring frown.

“It’s fine,” he promised. “Take care of the signatures for me, okay?”

Marco watched them as they hurried off down the street towards Armin’s apartment. Marco’s eyes burned holes into him from behind. _It’s fine_.

And Armin believed it was fine, but maybe that was stupid because he had no idea what _it_ was.

* * *

 **iii.** **pokrovskoye-streshnevo**

It was October but it was bitterly cold. It would probably snow one of these nights, blanket the city in a pure sparkling white that would bounce moonlight off streets and buildings. Napoleon misgauged snow like that. Napoleon had canned food invented for snow like that.

Paint chipped off the ceiling, flakes of blue and white. Voices echoed in this place, this mansion, jumped and slithered around faded gold balustrades and marble pillars. Shutters and doors leaned up against walls; mustached gargoyles arched over stairwells. Parts of the manor had been touched up, made livable again—like a bedroom or two, where dancing candlelight ate up the secrets the shadows betrayed as they had sex on a big king-sized bed with cool cotton sheets, clean feather-filled comforters, flushed and hard with fresh blood, legs spread, knees twitching, toes curling, hips rocking, fingers clawing for the headboard as Levi’s palm clapped across Eren’s mouth but it didn’t matter because his mewling groans were one with the house’s creaks and moans—

Livable like the bathroom, too, and oh God, there was something really nice about having to manually fill a clawfoot bath with hot water, something really old-fashioned and enchanting as scented candles flickered and the wind pried at the eaves. Somewhere in the black forests outside the mansion, wolves howled. Or maybe they were Wolves. Who’d said that, who’d said that when the outbreak happened Wolves took to the forests to avoid contamination? Were any still alive or had they all made the fatal mistake of sinking their teeth into the walking dead, too?

Eren was still sticky-damp and drying his hair as he came to a stop on the grand staircase, peering down through the electric lights into the repaired vestibule. “Hey,” he called. Levi didn’t look up from his spot lounging on a posh sofa, legs crossed, foot wagging, reading old newspapers he’d found at abandoned shops on the way back.

“Hey,” Eren prompted a second time, “where exactly are we, again?”

“Moscow,” Levi said flatly.

Mikasa turned the volume of the radio up on her side of the vestibule, throat and wrist prettily bandaged up after their snack. Levi always irritated her; Eren had a feeling Levi irritated her because she admired him. Mikasa was not a human volunteer who longed to be turned. She was fine being mortal. It was her inexplicable loyalty to the vampires that was undying.   

They were not there in Moscow for nothing.

In a pack of fur-collared coats and thick scarves, Erwin Smith showed up with new strangers. Under a dusty chandelier, Eren backed away against the wall like clinging human instinct dictated. 

It was unavoidable, though.

They wanted to grill him about what had happened six months ago, before Levi’s love, before Levi’s training, before the human bodyguards and trip to Russia—

“How did you do it?”

“I don’t know.”

“How did you know it wouldn’t hurt you?”

“ _I don’t know_.”

“Who turned you?”

“I don’t remember!”

“What killed your mother?”

“One of those—those _things_ —”

“How did you survive drinking from a zombie?”

“I don’t fucking _know!_ ” Eren cried, at a loss, at his wit’s end, at the end of his rope, tying a knot there and swinging, clinging for dear life. Tears burned the backs of his eyes, angry tears, the worst stinging shameful kind of tears. He could feel a sharp metallic rage bubbling up inside him. They had him at the long cobwebby table in some cold broken dining hall in the Moscow mansion, and they were interrogating him—Levi, examining so indifferently the faintly purple nails on the hand which had jacked Eren off not even two hours ago; Erwin, like a God damn myth with his strong shoulders and stronger jaw and flashing Undead eyes; this Hanji woman, glasses perched atop her head, and her three assistants, one of which was a mortal man; and Mikasa and Jean, consigned to the shadows, grim little guards with bandaged necks and loaded guns.

Levi dropped his hand to his lap, perfect shock softening his face to the same tender familiarity with which he’d moaned as Eren had rode him upstairs in some forgotten bedroom. He spoke quickly, but not kindly, because the realizing was not patient:

“Oh my God, the antibody is inside _you_ , isn’t it, Eren?”

Hanji suddenly seemed more attentive. One of her little assistants, the blond one, with the pageboy cap, leaned forward across the table and gasped, “The antibody? The _cure_ for those not-dead things?”

“The antibody?” Eren echoed, distraught. “How the fuck would it be inside me? I told you, I don’t know anything about the antibody except that my father has it, I know he has it—”

“And where the fuck is your father then, huh, _mudílo_?”

Erwin held out a hand to halt the merciless examination. He smiled, and it was the strangest thing that such a warm, handsome smile could also be so suspicious.

In his lovely velvety baritone, he said, “Tell us again, exactly how it happened.”

* * *

**iv. how it happened**

How it happened was that six months ago, he was hungry.

Eren was so hungry. That was all he knew. It cramped and coiled deep in his soul and he wanted to vomit but there was nothing inside. The world throbbed and danced to the waves of hunger; it scintillated astigmatic, prismatic, and his own heartbeat was a deafening bass chord urging him on. Like the beating hooves of apocalyptic horses, like the thundering drums of ritual forces, and he lurched forward at the first figure he saw, latched on like something rabid, cracked his jaw open and felt his eyeteeth extend with a wet little _shlick!_ and he plunged them into the figure’s throat before he realized there was something very, very wrong with this person.

This person was _dead_.

This person’s skin was like rotten fruit. This person’s blood was black and syrupy and bitter, tasted like the grave, tasted like rot, tasted like dirt and disease, tasted like _no heartbeat_ and Eren gulped long and hard and fast before thought could consciously overthrow primal preternatural instinct.

He staggered back into the lights from the watch towers, dripping bad blood down his face and shirt, wide-eyed and dazed.

They threw him in quarantine. They waited for the poison blood to destroy him but—it didn’t.

 _It didn’t_.

And so then it was white padded walls, glaring artificial light, _observation_. “How?” “Why?” “Monster…” They wanted to know what enzymes inside him were breaking the bad blood down into sustenance. They wanted to know what Undead biotics were protecting him from the bad blood. They wanted to know how he was able to drink from a zombie and survive it, not go mad in some sick rabid frenzy, and Eren itched and scratched at the needle taped into his arm because he didn’t want to donate his blood to their research, he wanted to—he wanted to—

“Want to what?” Levi had asked from the other side of the observation window, but Eren hadn’t known it was Levi then, Levi in his leather peacoat and gray sweater, Levi with his tousled dark hair and sharp Undead eyes, and that clever little twist of a smirk that set Eren on beautiful edge.

“Pathetic Omega,” Levi had cooed, lip curled. “How long ago were you turned, fledgling? A night? Two nights? Three?”

 _Babump. Babump. Babump_. His heartbeat was a powerful, maddening tempo.

“Who turned you? How the fuck can you drink from those disgusting things? The ‘zombies?’ No, I don’t mean _how_ , I mean how could you stomach it? They’re _gross_ —”

“ _I want to get out of here!_ ” Eren had howled, voice breaking, flinging himself at the window, beating his fists and scowling and hissing and gnashing his teeth at Levi like an animal, a God damn animal, and then a strong tall blond man had stalked up beside Levi and smiled so forgivingly down at him through the window and the blond man had said:

“We’re getting you out of here, promise.”

Erwin Smith, Commander of the Utopian Recon Forces, and his Captain Levi Ackerman, and the two mortal bodyguards attached to them like extensions of their shadows: Jean, Mikasa. They arranged for Eren’s release; they didn’t turn around when he changed out of the scrubs and into the clean new clothes they brought, which was a little embarrassing, especially holding eye contact with the male guard as he took his pants off; they shoved Mikasa at him first and then the male guard Jean, saying, “Drink a little, calm yourself,” and Jean had scowled at him but blushed and Mikasa had tipped her head like there was no other point for her existence and Eren had burst into tears because he wasn’t really sure what was going on. He remembered his father, he remembered his mother’s dead face, he remembered tears streaming down his father’s face and a syringe, his father saying, “Antibody, the antibody,” and trying to remember anything else was just like a stormy night in his head. He saw nothing, heard nothing, roaring chaos.

“They’re going to use you or they’re going to kill you or they’ll use you until they kill you,” Erwin Smith Commander of Recon said, very seriously, holding Eren by the shoulders and stooping to eye level. _They_. He meant the Military division of the Utopian Forces. “Unless you accept my recruitment offer, that’s your fate. I, however, do not want to use you or kill you. I want to find your father and get my hands on this antibody before anyone else does.”

On the way out, Levi had reached over and tapped Eren’s chin with his knuckle, said with a straight face, “Remember to keep your eyeteeth retracted, for Christ’s sake. Seeing your fangs out all the time makes me want to shove my tongue in your fucking mouth.”

* * *

**v. the day the world ended, the day the world began**

They all knew how to kill them, the walking dead: first step, destroy the spinal cord, easy when the head was severed from the body, because the virus sat somewhere in the brain and mutated all the neurotransmission, the fluids; second step was burning the remains lest some unknowing animal or human stumble upon it and accidentally infect themselves by the leftover carnage.

Rumor said vampires were secretly breeding more zombies, feeding screaming terrified humans to them in hopes of keeping the system of the world as it was now in proper order. Rumor said some radical Hunters were training zombies like dogs or willingly getting infected so that when vampires fed from them, they poisoned them. Rumor _also_ said that the vampires had created the virus and started the outbreak as some kind of biological warfare to tip world power their way, but that didn’t make sense, because the vampires hated the zombies, too. Bad blood ate them from the inside out; zombie attacks still hurt them; the zombies threatened their main food source: _humans_. So they protected the humans; they shepherded the humans; they drank from the humans in exchange for this security.

The vampires were rapidly building a new world order, some twisted international Undead kingdom with themselves on the throne. Some people said mankind had always had it coming; mankind was just too ignorant and arrogant, a deadly combination, add the poison of _power_ and it was diabolical.

December 21, 2012 was the day they said the outbreak was official, though the outbreak had been in full-swing before then and December 21 was just the day everyone realized their loved ones had become drooling mindless not-dead things out to eat them.

December 21, they said, was the day the world ended, though for Mikasa it was the day the world began.

Infected strangers broke into the rancher; they didn’t know they were infected. They were still in the rancher when the fever broke and the virus destroyed their cerebral cortexes. They were snarling and seething when her father went in to investigate the obvious intrusion. It had been dark; Mikasa waited in the driveway with her mother. Her mother went in. Somewhere in the distance, a car alarm was going off. Somebody in the house screamed. It was her mother. She saw her mother running for the open front door, saw her holding a gushing wound on her shoulder, saw her scream again and reach right at Mikasa before something in the dark of the house dragged her back inside and the screaming didn’t stop for five minutes but Mikasa waited, still buckled up in the backseat of the car.

Finally she went inside.

They were eating her mother and father.

Mikasa went next door. The neighbors refused to answer; they’d doomsday prepped, they knew what they were doing. Mikasa tried every door for two blocks until a boy on a bike under a Stop sign rang his bell at her.

“Hey!” he’d said.

“Hey,” she’d said back.

“It’s dangerous to be out in the dark,” he said, riding her way, silhouette swaying to a stop as he propped on one foot with a flop of bunny-eared shoelaces. He was in a tiny aviator jacket, ripped jeans. If the city hadn’t shut off the streetlights, they would have glinted in his amber eyes.

“Yeah,” Mikasa said. “So why are _you_ out?”

The boy turned, showing her the baseball bat stuck in his backpack. “I’m prepared,” he said. “My dad works all night. My mom doesn’t know I snuck out. Do you really believe there are monsters out?”

Mikasa whispered, “They’re in my house.”

The boy put her on the seat of his bike. He rode standing up behind her, hunched over her shoulder. They rode back to her house. They snuck in through the garage; they took a hammer from her father’s cork tool wall. They waited in the kitchen until the zombies shuffled in from the living room, dripping the blood and guts of Mikasa’s mother and father down their sweat-stained shirts. The boy shouted. “Over here!” He whistled. He jumped up on the island counter. He swung hard and his baseball bat smashed into the hissing not-dead thing’s face. He cocked back and swung again. The thing’s head burst like a cantaloupe across the dinner table. The other not-dead thing swiped the boy off the counter but Mikasa was ready to pounce; she beat and beat and beat with the hammer until the boy dragged her off and gave her his shirt because hers was covered in black gunk that was supposed to be blood but smelled like roadkill.

“My name’s Eren,” the boy husked, riding hunched over her shoulder again. “I don’t know where I’m supposed to take you, so I’m taking you home.”

Social services and foster care had still been in tact back then; Mikasa didn’t see Eren again until later.

 _Later_.

Later, after the vampires seized control over the hysterical humans, after over half the world died or came back rotten inside and hot for flesh, later when Mikasa enlisted as human volunteer for the Utopian Recon Forces, later when the Captain and the Commander heard about the vampire who’d drunk zombie blood and survived it—

And even though Eren didn’t remember a lot of what was probably very important, he remembered her.

He took one look at her and he burst into tears and he said, “I missed you, Mikasa,” and he sank his teeth into her throat for an unorthodox, probably very unsterile blood donation.

* * *

**vi. classified**

They left Moscow and went to Darmstadt.

Weird, how the trains still ran across Europe as if nothing had ever happened. They reeked of mold and decay soaked in cleaning chemicals. Their car was empty. The countryside and hollow shells of what used to be major stations smeared by outside the dimly-lit seats. They were like a bat in the night, swooping through the fog, across the Continent.

 _Sustenance_ , Hanji had said. _My plan man_.

She took sips from his wrist and his fingertips and just behind his ear like she usually did, but Armin realized with a shiver of clarity that he was there mostly to help figure out how this young vampire Eren could drink from a zombie and not destroy himself.

Darmstadt was a pseudo-military base. Practically. In a private building, they ran tests on him, this young Undead Eren. They checked his (changed) vitals; they looked for anomalies in his (changed) chromosomes; they mapped his senses and neural activity and they took vial after vial of samples of his blood, dark rich crimson blood, sending one or the other bodyguard in to replenish him after. And wasn’t _that_ like spying on something private.

They were looking for anything, _anything_ , any difference, any mutation, any sign of some antibody. But why would vampires want the antibody for the very virus that had put them in power?

_Plan man…_

“Oh,” Armin whispered, eyes widening, and the realization knocked the wind out of him as he sat back in his chair and stared across the room at Eren hooked up to beeping machinery like some deranged hospital patient—messy hair, bags under his sharp Undead eyes, perpetual scowl. “Oh,” Armin gasped, “this is classified research, isn’t it?”

Hanji smirked weakly.

* * *

**vii. stairway to heaven**

For six months, they’d had Eren in their custody before they finally got Hanji in to run tests.

The long wait had something to do with red tape and sneaking around after many denials, Jean knew. So Levi trained Eren; what else could they do? They were waiting for him to remember everything that had happened six months ago. They were waiting for Hanji’s go-ahead.

The Recon Forces mainly patrolled for trespassers in the wastelands, did a lot of zombie-ganking to make it out there where in some places not even the wind seemed to blow anymore. This was some kind of purge, surely, some biblical sweep like the Flood or brimstone rain on a sinful city.

But Jean didn’t mind.

Serving the vampires under the vampires’ terms was the easiest and safest way out of a life of hardship, Jean knew, and if that was a cowardly way to look at it then, well, he was a coward. But hey, he never went hungry; he never went cold; he drank regularly and got laid regularly and he held a position with a little bit of mortal superiority and that was something.

One of the things that fascinated Jean the most about the vampires—besides their powers of persuasion, their seductive charm, their kinky little teeth, their heightened senses, the way they could drink wine but couldn’t eat food, transubstantiation or some shit, the way they jizzed blood if they got it on after feeding because, well, it was all they had in them now, wasn’t it?—no, what _really_ fascinated Jean was that the vampires’ fingerprints had faded away in their transition from living to Undead.

He’d noticed when he was kissing Eren’s fingertips one night. After the kinky little teeth and the seductive charm. And the transubstantiation and the coming blood as bite wounds and hickeys flowered purple and sore on Jean’s wrist. No wonder they’d survived in secret for so damn long. _No fingerprints_. Not fair!

“I know you like it,” Eren had whispered against the back of Jean’s neck, running his lips up and down and around the jut of his spine there. “You like it when I drink from you.”

“Respectfully, fuck off,” Jean had muttered. “You don’t scare me. I’ve been working for vampires longer than you’ve _been_ a vampire.”

“Of course I don’t scare you, I turn you on—”

And God damn it, he did. He fucking _did_ , the cocky little blood bastard, lacing his cold fingers with Jean’s, curling them tight on Jean’s wrist, looking around at everyone, everything, the world, with those huge eager eyes of his, flashing those moody frowns when Levi or Erwin got after him, those fang-studded grins when he got what he wanted. And when the suicidal blood baby got a fucking gun in his hand and aimed for a zombie across an overgrown football field, _fuck_ , do him right there in the bleachers, don’t even worry about the pants, just lose the belt and let’s go, drink, drink, take a long hot gulp to get harder faster—

There was something sensual about it, though, about the penetration of the sharp little teeth, the offering of blood. It was a blasphemous sacrament. It was like old Greek ghosts, searching for life in the blood. It was the same with vampires.

Eren had the most annoying way of not even realizing his own sinister sex appeal, like that time outside of Recon HQ when he’d shoved both arms around Jean’s waist and pressed his nose behind his ear and just _drank_ right there in public. God, it was like love bites, deep pinching love bites. Jean’s hips rolled. He’d forgotten his place. He wanted to slam Eren against the wall and reach down his pants and make him come fresh blood and Eren would grind into him until he came, too, anything, everything, fuck the Anti-Vamps who harassed living-Undead relations, it was just so undeniably _intimate_ , they didn’t know what they were missing, none of the old books and fairy tales had gotten it exactly right unless vampire society had evolved just like human society—

And across the street from HQ there had been a Coalition assembly, waving their signs and chanting their push for consensual desanguination, the very right Jean had surrendered. Jean’s heart sank and the knots in his gut went leaden and he’d met the eyes of one of them, as Eren drank in sure gulps from his throat, drank without Jean’s verbal consent, met the big bright eyes of one of them with freckles, and a pretty blue scarf, and he’d stared Jean down and it had felt like voyeurism, felt like violation, as Eren broke away from his bloody kiss and tugged Jean by the elbow to follow him and the Commander, the Captain, and as they’d left, the freckled man had called, “You don’t have to be theirs! We can fight the walking dead on our own!”

Jean had been so ashamed.

God, how far was he from human now?

* * *

**viii. the (secretly) married couple**

Levi dragged Erwin aside with fingers like bruises.

“Ow,” Erwin whined, half-heartedly, prying Levi’s grip from his arm and trying to wind it instead around Levi’s waist. Levi refused, jerking away.

“ _Erwin_ ,” Levi spat, through his teeth, eyes wide. Eren was screaming obscenities at Hanji again; he was angry they were testing small injections of bad blood into his system. He was growling like a dog and Levi was sometimes worried that wasn’t innocence and instinct, but some deeper demented design they didn’t understand yet.

“What?” Erwin snapped back, clearly offended by Levi’s rejection. Levi snorted, putting an arm around Erwin’s waist to make up for it. He swirled his fingers at the base of Erwin’s spine, eyes lowered. He shook his head; he shrugged. For a moment he feared he couldn’t get the words out. Finally, in the shadows, he drew a breath and fixed Erwin’s stare and husked:

“What if he was one of those _things_ but was _cured_ before he was _turned_?”

A shadow eclipsed Erwin’s face. It was handsome, but it was daunting. His eyes clouded. The smile on his face fell for a moment, then returned with a vengeance. But it was not one of relief; it was of resolve.

He nodded slowly, looking back to Hanji and her assistants and their very passionate, headstrong little experiment.

“Jesus fucking Christ, love,” Erwin whispered, and Levi shrank closer to his side, familiar body, body he knew, body that had betrayed him with this fucking fledgling, “I bet you’re _right_ —”

* * *

**ix. how it happened, pt ii**

How it happened was that six months ago, before he was hungry, Eren was sick.

He must have gotten infected somehow working with his mother. She was a nurse; not fighting the outbreak was simply against everything she stood for. They had special permits from the vampires to aid infected humans. His father had acquired them. He worked in the new hospitals, at night. There was no aiding infected humans, Eren realized now. His father and some other doctors were trying very hard to find an antibody, something to kill the virus before it took over. The infected humans were lab rats. 

Maybe it was when that one patient lied about how sick he was; maybe it was when his fever broke and he grinned this huge toothy smile and bit so hard into his mother’s arm that it snapped the bone and she clamped her hand on her mouth to stifle her guttural shrieks lest she raise alarm in any of the other infected patients.

Eren was eleven beds down. He heard her screaming. He was loading a needle for a patient whose pain required a little opiate nip in the bud but he dropped it, dropped it with a tinkling sound on the floor, and the world shrank, it narrowed, his ears rang, he heard nothing but his mother screaming, he saw nothing but the dim hall lights and the scuffed tile floors, other shocked nurses, he ran past the line of curtained beds—

But it was too late.

Eren didn’t think twice before killing the rabid patient.

Maybe it scratched him in its flailing, and some of the bad blood got into his system. Maybe the virus passed through beads of spit. Maybe he inhaled some of it.   

Either way, Eren dropped the electric bone saw and it was still going, it danced on the tile floor, the other nurses were screaming, screaming, he walked out of the outbreak infirmary without even clocking out and he threw up outside and however the virus entered him, he got sick, too.

He didn’t tell his father.

His father wasn’t really around to notice the signs.

Eren noticed the signs.

The fever, the body aches, the chills, the loss of appetite, the swollen lymph nodes, the fading of colors, the kidney pain, the chest pain, the tremors, the sweats, the memory loss, the coordination loss, the stiff muscles, the leak of cerebrospinal fluid like a runny nose, he went out every night, snuck out past the walls and the guards, and he took his baseball bat, and he screamed for the not-dead things to come and fucking get him, and with some motherfucking Chopin and Schubert blasting from his mp3 player he bashed their God damn heads in, he smashed them to smithereens like batting at apples, he lit them on fire and when the sun was licking at the horizon he snuck back into the city and—

Eventually, though, the fever knocked him flat. The fever never went away, after all. It just kept rising, rising, melting his insides probably, destroying his immune system.  

The fever broke.

And Eren remembered walking. Seeing. Spitting up black bile. Scratching. Staggering. Snarling. His father. His father crying. His father with a syringe. His father trying a vein in his arm before fumbling for a bigger needle, a fatter needle, begging Eren to stop moving, stop growling, stop, stop, stop, _the antibody, Christ, the antibody_ —and then there was peace. There was a blanket of numbness. There was the lulling throb of his heartbeat, far away, tickling his ears. There was a sharp pain in his wrist and a sucking pressure, a pulling, a draining, everything was tingling, his heartbeat faded away, and then through the ringing in his ears he heard his father again—

“ _Drink, for the love of God, drink, boy!_ ”

So he drank.

He drank and he drank and he drank and he tasted his father’s heartbeat, he almost swallowed his father’s heartbeat, but it was too much like a clot from a nosebleed so he flipped it back from his tongue, and he realized that he was on the cold kitchen floor and his father was heavy on top of him and he heaved him away, rolled him off, heard his head and knuckles thud against the linoleum, heard him groan, low and feeble, and Eren sat in the dark, covered in blood—black, red—staring at his almost unconscious father.

There was an empty syringe near the cabinets, rolled under near the mouse traps. His father’s eyes fluttered. His pupils were elliptical, like a vampire’s. His eyeteeth were long and sharp, like a vampire’s. His father’s mouth was red; his father’s wrist was bloody and torn apart. That was where Eren had pushed the heartbeat back, he knew. He knew because he’d been drinking his father’s blood, like his father had been drinking from _his_ opened wrist. Drank to the threshold of death and then gave him new blood. His father’s eyes finally shut and he was quiet.  

Eren was hungry.

That was all he knew. It cramped and coiled deep in his soul and he wanted to vomit but there was nothing inside because all the blood he’d swallowed when his father had turned him into what he’d, himself, previously become some time ago had already transmuted inside him.

How it happened was that six months ago, Eren was hungry.

Six months later, still attached to Hanji’s monitors and machines, Eren rattled out a howl of angry, guilty, electric pain, and as his voice frayed with it, he curled into a ball and let it dissolve into desperate little sobs.

* * *

**x. the decision**

“His father was a vampire?”

“We don’t procreate—how—”

“He must have turned sometime _after_ Eren was born.”

“God damn it! Don’t you get it? There _is_ no real antibody. _God damn it!_ ”

“Well, there _is_ —er, _was_ , but the only antibody was used on himso either it’s still in him, it’s in his blood, or it’s dissipated.”

“But what would you do with the antibody?” Armin whispered, eyes wide and wild, bouncing between his vampire superiors.

“Cure them all, of course,” Hanji suggested. She received a few disparaging glances for that one.

“But then what?” Armin pressed.

“Rehabilitate them, I suppose.”

“But _then_ what? Go back to normal? Fade away into the shadows again? Things are never going to be the same—never—it’s impossible—”

Levi snorted. “I don’t like your pet, Hanji. He talks too much.”

Erwin cleared his throat. “So he killed his father, huh?”

“Drained him,” Hanji confirmed in a low murmur. “But it saved him, somehow.”

“Do you think…we could use his blood to make a new antibody?”

“Erwin, this reeks of conspiracy.”

“Who would we vaccinate, our kind? Everyone—”

“I didn’t kill him.”

The voice rang out tiny but tense. The machinating group looked up from the front room of this Darmstadt flat—Erwin, Levi, Hanji, her assistants. Eren was in the doorway, dripping from another bath. He was in pajamas. His shoulders drooped. Mikasa was beside him, like some cold wordless governess. Jean was on his other side, fresh blood staining the bandage at his throat, skin purpled with hickeys and lionized flesh. The clock near the fireplace said dawn came in only a few hours. Outside on the cobbled Darmstadt streets, a rare military truck or two rattled by.

Levi was the first to break the silence, soft spot shining through in the corners of his glance as he fixed it on Eren their little monster martyr.

“…What?” he breathed.

“I didn’t kill him,” Eren said again, voice hoarse. “My father. He was still alive. I didn’t swallow his heartbeat. I don’t know where he went after, or if he knows _I’m_ still alive. But he’s not dead. And he probably has more of the antibody.”

The silence spun out, brittle.

Erwin gestured for Eren. Eren acquiesced, easing down between the Commander and the Captain on the couch. Mikasa looked on edge; Jean looked a little faint, but otherwise alert. Erwin smiled, hoping it might assuage a bit of the guilt that had Eren’s face set in a cold stare. It just didn’t suit him.

“That’s good,” Erwin murmured. “That’s very good. I believe you.”

Eren shrugged. He leaned forward from the couch and held out a hand for Hanji’s little blond assistant. He croaked, “Hi, I’m Eren.”

“Armin,” the blond replied, shaking Eren’s hand without a moment’s thought.

Eren nodded, running a tongue along one of his tiny fangs. He folded back into the couch, pulling his feet up, leaning to the side against Erwin’s shoulder and burying his toes under Levi’s thigh. “You’re human,” he commented, never one for tact, it seemed, or timing.

“I am,” Armin mumbled.  

“And you like us?”

“I trust you.”

“Well, you’re either really stupid, or really _smart_ ,” Eren husked.

Erwin cleared his throat, glance full of unspokens volleying between Hanji and Levi and back again before veering down to meet Eren once more.

“Eren,” he said, reclaiming control of the conversation. “Will you help us find your father?”

Eren was mute. He looked to his feet. He looked to Jean, to Armin, to Mikasa. His eyes lingered a bit longer on Levi. Finally, bruises already fading from the intrusive bite of Hanji’s IVs, he looked back to Erwin and shrugged again.

“Yes,” he whispered. “Let’s find my father and the antibody.”

* * *

 

**_End._ **


End file.
